Chapter 5

So he returns; having written to Cecil the highest praises of Essex, whom he treats with all courtesy and fairness; which those who will may call cunning: we have as good a right to say that he was returning good for evil. There were noble qualities in Essex. All the world gave him credit for them, and far more than he deserved; why should not Raleigh have been just to him; even have conceived, like the rest of the world, high hopes of him, till he himself destroyed these hopes? For now storms are rising fast. On their return Cecil is in power. He has been made Secretary of State instead of Bodley, Essex’s pet, and the spoilt child begins to sulk. On which matter, I am sorry to say, historians talk much unwisdom, about Essex’s being too ‘open and generous, etc., for a courtier,’ and ‘presuming on his mistress’s passion for him’; and representing Elizabeth as desiring to be thought beautiful, and ‘affecting at sixty the sighs, loves, tears, and tastes of a girl of sixteen,’ and so forth. It is really time to get rid of some of this fulsome talk, culled from such triflers as Osborne, if not from the darker and fouler sources of Parsons and the Jesuit slanderers, which I meet with a flat denial. There is simply no proof. She in love with Essex or Cecil? Yes, as a mother with a son. Were they not the children of her dearest and most faithful servants, men who had lived heroic lives for her sake? What wonder if she fancied that she saw the fathers in the sons? They had been trained under her eye. What wonder if she fancied that they could work as their fathers worked before them? And what shame if her childless heart yearned over them with unspeakable affection, and longed in her old age to lay her hands upon the shoulders of those two young men, and say to England, ‘Behold the children which God, and not the flesh, has given me!’ Most strange it is, too, that women, who ought at least to know a woman’s heart, have been especially forward in publishing these scandals, and sullying their pages by retailing pruriences against such a one as Queen Elizabeth.

But to return. Raleigh attaches himself to Cecil; and he has good reason. Cecil is the cleverest man in England, saving himself. He has trusted and helped him, too, in two Guiana voyages; so the connection is one of gratitude as well as prudence. We know not whether he helped him in the third Guiana voyage in the same year, under Captain Berry, a north Devon man, from Grenvile’s country; who found a ‘mighty folk,’ who were ‘something pleasant, having drunk much that day,’ and carried bows with golden handles: but failed in finding the Lake Parima, and so came home.

Raleigh’s first use of his friendship with Cecil is to reconcile him, to the astonishment of the world, with Essex, alleging how much good may grow by it; for now ‘the Queen’s continual unquietness will grow to contentment.’ That, too, those who will may call policy. We have as good a right to call it the act of a wise and faithful subject, and to say, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.’ He has his reward for it in full restoration to the Queen’s favour; he deserves it. He proves himself once more worthy of power, and it is given to him. Then there is to be a second great expedition: but this time its aim is the Azores. Philip, only maddened by the loss at Cadiz, is preparing a third armament for the invasion of England and Ireland, and it is said to lie at the islands to protect the Indian fleet. Raleigh has the victualling of the land-forces, and, like everything else he takes in hand, ‘it is very well done.’ Lord Howard declines the chief command, and it is given to Essex. Raleigh is to be rear-admiral.

By the time they reach the Azores, Essex has got up a foolish quarrel against Raleigh for disrespect in having stayed behind to bring up some stragglers. But when no Armada is to be found at the Azores, Essex has after all to ask Raleigh what he shall do next. Conquer the Azores, says Raleigh, and the thing is agreed on. Raleigh and Essex are to attack Fayal. Essex sails away before Raleigh has watered. Raleigh follows as fast as he can, and at Fayal finds no Essex. He must water there, then and at once. His own veterans want him to attack forthwith, for the Spaniards are fortifying fast: but he will wait for Essex. Still no Essex comes. Raleigh attempts to water, is defied, finds himself ‘in for it,’ and takes the island out of hand in the most masterly fashion, to the infuriation of Essex. Good Lord Howard patches up the matter, and the hot-headed coxcomb is once more pacified. They go on to Graciosa, where Essex’s weakness of will again comes out, and he does not take the island. Three rich Caracks, however, are picked up. ‘Though we shall be little the better for them,’ says Raleigh privately to Sir Arthur Gorges, his faithful captain, ‘yet I am heartily glad for our General’s sake; because they will in great measure give content to her Majesty, so that there may be no repining against this poor Lord for the expense of the voyage.’

Raleigh begins to see that Essex is only to be pitied; that the voyage is not over likely to end well: but he takes it, in spite of ill-usage, as a kind-hearted man should. Again Essex makes a fool of himself. They are to steer one way in order to intercept the Plate-fleet. Essex having agreed to the course pointed out, alters his course on a fancy; then alters it a second time, though the hapless Monson, with the whole Plate-fleet in sight, is hanging out lights, firing guns, and shrieking vainly for the General, who is gone on a new course, in which he might have caught the fleet after all, in spite of his two mistakes, but that he chooses to go a roundabout way instead of a short one; and away goes the whole fleet, save one Carack, which runs itself on shore and burns, and the game is played out and lost.

All want Essex to go home, as the season is getting late: but the wilful and weak man will linger still, and while he is hovering to the south, Philip’s armament has sailed from the Groyne, on the undefended shores of England, and only God’s hand saves us from the effects of Essex’s folly. A third time the Armadas of Spain are overwhelmed by the avenging tempests, and Essex returns to disgrace, having proved himself at once intemperate and incapable. Even in coming home there is confusion, and Essex is all but lost on the Bishop and Clerks, by Scilly, in spite of the warnings of Raleigh’s sailing-master, ‘Old Broadbent,’ who is so exasperated at the general stupidity that he wants Raleigh to leave Essex and his squadron to get out of their own scrape as they can.

Essex goes off to sulk at Wanstead; but Vere excuses him, and in a few days he comes back, and will needs fight good Lord Howard for being made Earl of Nottingham for his services against the Armada and at Cadiz. Baulked of this, he begins laying the blame of the failure at the Azores on Raleigh. Let the spoilt naughty boy take care; even that ‘admirable temper’ for which Raleigh is famed may be worn out at last.

These years are Raleigh’s noon—stormy enough at best, yet brilliant. There is a pomp about him, outward and inward, which is terrible to others, dangerous to himself. One has gorgeous glimpses of that grand Durham House of his, with its carvings and its antique marbles, armorial escutcheons, ‘beds with green silk hangings and legs like dolphins, overlaid with gold’: and the man himself, tall, beautiful, and graceful, perfect alike in body and in mind, walking to and fro, his beautiful wife upon his arm, his noble boy beside his knee, in his ‘white satin doublet, embroidered with pearls, and a great chain of pearls about his neck,’ lording it among the lords with an ‘awfulness and ascendency above other mortals,’ for which men say that ‘his næve is, that he is damnable proud’; and no wonder. The reduced squire’s younger son has gone forth to conquer the world; and he fancies, poor fool, that he has conquered it, just as it really has conquered him; and he will stand now on his blood and his pedigree (no bad one either), and all the more stiffly because puppies like Lord Oxford, who instead of making their fortunes have squandered them, call him ‘jack and upstart,’ and make impertinent faces while the Queen is playing the virginals, about ‘how when jacks go up, heads go down.’ Proud? No wonder if the man be proud! ‘Is not this great Babylon, which I have built?’ And yet all the while he has the most affecting consciousness that all this is not God’s will, but the will of the flesh; that the house of fame is not the house of God; that its floor is not the rock of ages, but the sea of glass mingled with fire, which may crack beneath him any moment, and let the nether flame burst up. He knows that he is living in a splendid lie; that he is not what God meant him to be. He longs to flee away and be at peace. It is to this period, not to his death-hour, that ‘The Lie’ belongs; {155} saddest of poems, with its melodious contempt and life-weariness. All is a lie—court, church, statesmen, courtiers, wit and science, town and country, all are shams; the days are evil; the canker is at the root of all things; the old heroes are dying one by one; the Elizabethan age is rotting down, as all human things do, and nothing is left but to bewail with Spenser ‘The Ruins of Time’; the glory and virtue which have been—the greater glory and virtue which might be even now, if men would but arise and repent, and work righteousness, as their fathers did before them. But no. Even to such a world as this he will cling, and flaunt it about as captain of the guard in the Queen’s progresses and masques and pageants, with sword-belt studded with diamonds and rubies, or at tournaments, in armour of solid silver, and a gallant train with orange-tawny feathers, provoking Essex to bring in a far larger train in the same colours, and swallow up Raleigh’s pomp in his own, so achieving that famous ‘feather triumph’ by which he gains little but bad blood and a good jest. For Essex is no better tilter than he is general; and having ‘run very ill’ in his orange-tawny, comes next day in green, and runs still worse, and yet is seen to be the same cavalier; whereon a spectator shrewdly observes that he changed his colours ‘that it may be reported that there was one in green who ran worse than he in orange-tawny.’ But enough of these toys, while God’s handwriting is upon the wall above all heads.

Raleigh knows that the handwriting is there. The spirit which drove him forth to Virginia and Guiana is fallen asleep: but he longs for Sherborne and quiet country life, and escapes thither during Essex’s imprisonment, taking Cecil’s son with him, and writes as only he can write about the shepherd’s peaceful joys, contrasted with ‘courts’ and ‘masques’ and ‘proud towers’—

‘Here are no false entrapping baits Too hasty for too hasty fates, Unless it be The fond credulity Of silly fish, that worlding who still look Upon the bait, but never on the hook; Nor envy, unless among The birds, for prize of their sweet song.

‘Go! let the diving negro seek For pearls hid in some forlorn creek, We all pearls scorn, Save what the dewy morn Congeals upon some little spire of grass, Which careless shepherds beat down as they pass And gold ne’er here appears Save what the yellow Ceres bears.’

Tragic enough are the after scenes of Raleigh’s life: but most tragic of all are these scenes of vain-glory, in which he sees the better part, and yet chooses the worse, and pours out his self-discontent in song which proves the fount of delicacy and beauty which lies pure and bright beneath the gaudy artificial crust. What might not this man have been! And he knows that too. The stately rooms of Durham House pall on him, and he delights to hide up in his little study among his books and his chemical experiments, and smoke his silver pipe, and look out on the clear Thames and the green Surrey hills, and dream about Guiana and the Tropics; or to sit in the society of antiquaries with Selden and Cotton, Camden and Stow; or in his own Mermaid Club, with Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Beaumont, and at last with Shakspeare’s self to hear and utter

‘Words that have been So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whom they came Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest.’

Anything to forget the handwriting on the wall, which will not be forgotten. But he will do all the good which he can meanwhile, nevertheless. He will serve God and Mammon. So complete a man will surely be able to do both. Unfortunately the thing is impossible, as he discovers too late: but he certainly goes as near success in the attempt as ever man did. Everywhere we find him doing justly and loving mercy. Wherever this man steps he leaves his footprint ineffaceably in deeds of benevolence. For one year only, it seems, he is governor of Jersey; yet to this day, it is said, the islanders honour his name, only second to that of Duke Rollo, as their great benefactor, the founder of their Newfoundland trade. In the west country he is ‘as a king,’ ‘with ears and mouth always open to hear and deliver their grievances, feet and hands ready to go and work their redress.’ The tin-merchants have become usurers ‘of fifty in the hundred.’ Raleigh works till he has put down their ‘abominable and cut-throat dealing.’ There is a burdensome west-country tax on curing fish; Raleigh works till it is revoked. In Parliament he is busy with liberal measures, always before his generation. He puts down a foolish act for compulsory sowing of hemp in a speech on the freedom of labour worthy of the nineteenth century. He argues against raising the subsidy from the three-pound men—‘Call you this, Mr. Francis Bacon, _par jugum_, when a poor man pays as much as a rich?’ He is equally rational and spirited against the exportation of ordnance to the enemy; and when the question of abolishing monopolies is mooted he has his wise word. He too is a monopolist of tin, as Lord Warden of the Stannaries. But he has so wrought as to bring good out of evil; for ‘before the granting of his patent, let the price of tin be never so high, the poor workman never had but two shillings a week’; yet now, so has he extended and organised the tin-works, ‘that any man who will can find work, be tin at what price soever, and have four shillings a week truly paid . . . Yet if all others may be repealed, I will give my consent as freely to the cancelling of this as any member of this house.’ Most of the monopolies were repealed: but we do not find that Raleigh’s was among them. Why should it be if its issue was more tin, full work, and double wages? In all things this man approves himself faithful in his generation. His sins are not against man, but against God; such as the world thinks no sins, and hates them, not from morality, but from envy.

In the meanwhile, the evil which, so Spenser had prophesied, only waited Raleigh’s death breaks out in his absence, and Ireland is all aflame with Tyrone’s rebellion. Raleigh is sent for. He will not accept the post of Lord Deputy and go to put it down. Perhaps he does not expect fair play as long as Essex is at home. Perhaps he knows too much of the ‘common weal, or rather common woe,’ and thinks that what is crooked cannot be made straight. Perhaps he is afraid to lose by absence his ground at court. Would that he had gone, for Ireland’s sake and his own. However, it must not be. Ormond is recalled, and Knollys shall be sent: but Essex will have none but Sir George Carew; whom, Naunton says, he hates, and wishes to oust from court. He and Elizabeth argue it out. He turns his back on her, and she gives him—or does not give him, for one has found so many of these racy anecdotes vanish on inspection into simple wind, that one believes none of them—a box on the ear; which if she did, she did the most wise, just, and practical thing which she could do with such a puppy. He claps his hand—or does not—to his sword, ‘He would not have taken it from Henry VIII.,’ and is turned out forthwith. In vain Egerton, the Lord Keeper, tries to bring him to reason. He storms insanely. Every one on earth is wrong but he: every one is conspiring against him; he talks of ‘Solomon’s fool’ too. Had he read the Proverbs a little more closely, he might have left the said fool alone, as being a too painfully exact likeness of himself. It ends by his being worsted, and Raleigh rising higher than ever. I cannot see why Raleigh should be represented as henceforth becoming Essex’s ‘avowed enemy,’ save on the ground that all good men are and ought to be the enemies of bad men, when they see them about to do harm, and to ruin the country. Essex is one of the many persons upon whom this age has lavished a quantity of sentimentality, which suits oddly enough with its professions of impartiality. But there is an impartiality which ends in utter injustice; which by saying carelessly to every quarrel, ‘Both are right, and both are wrong,’ leaves only the impression that all men are wrong, and ends by being unjust to every one. So has Elizabeth and Essex’s quarrel been treated. There was some evil in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was a fool for liking him. There was some good in Essex; therefore Elizabeth was cruel in punishing him. This is the sort of slipshod dilemma by which Elizabeth is proved to be wrong, even while Essex is confessed to be wrong too; while the patent facts of the case are, that Elizabeth bore with him as long as she could, and a great deal longer than any one else could. Why Raleigh should be accused of helping to send Essex into Ireland, I do not know. Camden confesses (at the same time that he gives a hint of the kind) that Essex would let no one go but himself. And if this was his humour, one can hardly wonder at Cecil and Raleigh, as well as Elizabeth, bidding the man begone and try his hand at government, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices. He goes; does nothing; or rather worse than nothing; for in addition to the notorious ill-management of the whole matter, we may fairly say that he killed Elizabeth. She never held up her head again after Tyrone’s rebellion. Elizabeth still clings to him, changing her mind about him every hour, and at last writes him such a letter as he deserves. He has had power, money, men, such as no one ever had before. Why has he done nothing but bring England to shame? He comes home frantically—the story of his bursting into the dressing-room rests on no good authority—with a party of friends at his heels, leaving Ireland to take care of itself. Whatever entertainment he met with from the fond old woman, he met with the coldness which he deserved from Raleigh and Cecil. Who can wonder? What had he done to deserve aught else? But he all but conquers; and Raleigh takes to his bed in consequence, sick of the whole matter; as one would have been inclined to do oneself. He is examined and arraigned; writes a maudlin letter to Elizabeth. Elizabeth has been called a fool for listening to such pathetical ‘love letters’: and then hardhearted for not listening to them. Poor Lady! do what she would, she found it hard enough to please all parties while alive; must she be condemned over and above _in æternum_ to be wrong whatsoever she did? Why is she not to have the benefit of the plain straightforward interpretation which would be allowed to any other human being; namely, that she approved of such fine talk as long as it was proved to be sincere by fine deeds: but that when these were wanting, the fine talk became hollow, fulsome, a fresh cause of anger and disgust? Yet still she weeps over Essex when he falls sick, as any mother would; and would visit him if she could with honour. But a ‘malignant influence counteracts every disposition to relent.’ No doubt, a man’s own folly, passion, and insolence has generally a very malignant influence on his fortunes; and he may consider himself a very happy man if all that befalls to him thereby is what befell Essex, namely, deprivation of his offices and imprisonment in his own house. He is forgiven after all; but the spoilt child refuses his bread and butter without sugar. What is the pardon to him without a renewal of his licence of sweet wines? Because he is not to have that, the Queen’s ‘conditions are as crooked as her carcase.’ Flesh and blood can stand no more, and ought to stand no more. After all that Elizabeth has been to him, that speech is the speech of a brutal and ungrateful nature. And such he shows himself to be in the hour of trial. What if the patent for sweet wines is refused him? Such gifts were meant as the reward of merit; and what merit has he to show? He never thinks of that. Blind with fury, he begins to intrigue with James, and slanders to him, under colour of helping his succession, all whom he fancies opposed to him. What is worse, he intrigues with Tyrone about bringing over an army of Irish Papists to help him against the Queen, and this at the very time that his sole claim to popularity rests on his being the leader of the Puritans. A man must have been very far gone, either in baseness or in hatred, who represents Raleigh to James as dangerous to the commonweal on account of his great power in the west of England and Jersey, ‘places fit for the Spaniard to land in.’ Cobham, as Warden of the Cinque Ports, is included in his slander; and both he and Raleigh will hear of it again.